The oversharing of vacation photos

Or just share so many details of their lives, whether in real time or not. My wife is a compulsive photo poster of our two girls, but I had to tell her to stop posting photos of us and tagging me in photos. Maybe she needs the affirmation of her peers and family — she's very outgoing, where I'm more reticent — but I don't. I have a core group of about five or six friends whose opinions I value, and that's it.

Hmm ... did I just share too much?

 

I have this deep-seated fear that the world thinks I'm really boring. My friends tease me about not being "handy" around the house, for example. Like a lot of us, I'm sure, I grew up .... bookish. And it's very clear a lot of people still think of me that way, particularly people from in the day.

One day a couple years ago we're riding past an REI store in St. Louis, I think it was. There's a kayak sale advertised. I off-handedly blurt, "I've been wanting to buy a kayak." And my brother and my best friend have a big laugh at my expense, "You want to buy a kayak?!" "Yes, why?" "Have you ever even been in a kayak?" (They both continue to laugh their asses off.) "Yes, every summer for the last five or six summers. But never mind. Forget I said anything. How about those Cardinals?"

At least personally, I think I'm driven sometimes to post to show people that I'm not the person I was when I was 12. (Like Cross Canadian Ragweed sang, "You're always 17 in your hometown.")

Intellectually, I know I shouldn't care about that. I'm trying to care less about it. Maybe not everyone is as introspective as me and would recognize it in exactly these terms, but I do think that my impulses to post derive from that desire to scream: I'm not boring! Maybe my friend is the same. You're on Facebook. You have 1,000 "friends." And you want them to know who you are now.

I've been to memorial services where nobody can think of anything to say about the person, or else they mischaracterize them completely. Ugh, that shit haunts me.

 

You need to stop going to memorial services. Tell the deceased nice things before they croak.

 

Maybe you could build a tree fort.

 

I love my children and I do not want to kill them.

 

GREAT song.

 

I've always said that Facebook proves that the idiots that you knew in high school didn't get any smarter just because 30 years have passed and they have a couple of kids.

 

I actually don't like that my ex posts so many pictures of our kids online, because my kids, grown up, might not want all that shit out there. Through her various blogs and social media accounts, their entire childhoods have been documented for almost anyone to see. She's made her Instagram private recently, which is good, but the rest of that stuff is just out there, and my kids haven't been given any say in it. It's possible that they grow up and don't care and feel like that's just the norm. But for me it's like religion: It should be entirely up to them.

 

Almost every regret I have is the result of caring what other people, often strangers on the Internet, think of me. It took some major personal trauma and months of therapy to get to the point where I truly don't give a shit. It was a pretty awful process, but I am so much happier for the result. I hope you don't have to go through the same kind of exorcism to get there, but I can honestly tell you that you will be much better off if you can shake those ghosts.

 

I won't. At least I don't think so. But it really is fucked how social media has changed things, for a lot of people, in a short amount of time. When I was on the beat, I traveled the country every fall. Not once did it ever occur to me to think, "Goddamn, the people I went to in high school need to know that I'm on Bourbon Street right now!"

The rise of social media tapped into these insecurities most of us didn't even know we had, I think. Or maybe it created insecurities where none previously existed. I'm not sure, and I'm not sure there's a practical distinction.

But it's fascinating. And scary.

 

People put some fucked stuff of their kids up. Sick or injured kids photos are a thing on Instagram and Facebook. Why? A lot of people also post their kids' grades, which seems to me like a complete invasion of privacy.

I mean, look, if your kid joins the Marines, and he's good with it, put that up there. Dartmouth acceptance? And he's good with it? Put that up there.

But the world's need to know that your 7-year-old got a B+ in art doesn't seem to outweigh said 7-year-old's right to privacy.

 

Every child of the 70s has a bathtub photo out there somewhere. It exists, and you know it exists, and you lived in terrible fear that one day it might somehow get out into the world and destroy you. Today's kids have 10,000 bathtub photos posted online before they turn six. It's fucking weird.